Mastodawn

Well that was an interesting exercise. Many thanks to all of you who voted and replied.

It confirms my impression that Mastodon folk are a techie bunch, though possibly not quite as techie as the results suggest as I would have thought techie people would be more likely to engage than non-techie people.

Pleased to see that Windows servers are so rare.

Interesting to read what people use their servers for. Media streaming seems to be a biggie, but Pi-hole and home automation are also popular.

One other thing I learned is that defining what a "server" is is far from simple.

Many people were using Raspberry Pis rather than the big hulking boxes you'd traditionally think of as a server.

Martin Vermeer FCD Sep 18, 2024

@statsguy Who would run a *server* on Windows.

@martinvermeer The company I work for, for starters.

But apparently not many people do at home, which is nice.

Andi Popp 🇺🇦🎗️

Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I have a Raspberry Pi running Plex on Raspbian as a Media server for stationary (e.g. smart TVs) and mobile devices in my WiFi. I hope that counts :)

@AndiPopp Yes, that counts

benni Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy the most Techie answer would be: Define "Server".

Wizard Sep 17, 2024

@benni @statsguy hmm made me think, and without having much thought put into this answer, I guess I would define a server as a network connected device with a listening port open, and an application behind that port xP
I'll be waiting for the ton of things that don't live up to this definition, but still are a server, or things that live up to this definition but aren't servers.

benni Sep 17, 2024

@wizard so basically any device with internet-connection is a server? than anybody would have not one but many today in most homes. sounds not very techie ;) @statsguy

Benjohn Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy mostly my son, but discord bots, pi hole, a proxy, torrents.

zwangseinweisung Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Usally i prefer freebsd but pihole (and some other rpis are) linux

Ronnie Soak Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Small home server built around an ITX board running fileserver, Graphana for HA sensors, Gitea, Nextcloud, Firefly and newly JellyFin and InvenTree.
Only Nextcloud is serving to the outside, rest is LAN-only.
Moved the Minecraft server to another machine. Doesn't need to be around 24/7.

JeniParsons Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I checked ‘no’ because I didn’t really understand the question so I guess I answered correctly 😊

FeralRobots Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I put 'no' because while I do have a file share for music, I rarely access it (& my wife never does), & it's just a USB drive mounted on our wireless router. So it's not really a "server"as such.
Also I keep not getting around to installing that full blown media server I keep meaning to install.

Ian Jackson Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I have a small VM host. It and its guest do basic network management, run the WAN ppp session, provide printing and music jukebox services, etc.
I used to have a house mail domain and nntp server but spam means you don't want more mail domains than you can get away with, and the net is fast and reliable enough that I can do news and mailreading on my colo in an interactive ssh session.
Likewise there used to be various distro mirrors but now there's just a squid cache for that.

Gabriel Pettier Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy repurposed my previous laptop as a media center of sort on the machine, and it hosts a couple locally accessible things, a bit borderline, but counted as "yes running linux". 😅

(i used to have something more proper, a long time ago, so i guess that matches your intent)

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy fewer BSD folks than I expected. y'all are missing out!

fraggLe!Sep 17, 2024

@gsuberland @statsguy I picked Linux because more servers in my house run that than BSD. 😭

Maybe one day I'll address this grievous error.

Carlos Mogas da Silva Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy 2 actually. HomeLab Proxmox cluster.

NO NAME Sep 17, 2024

I have (2) servers in my house. Both used for virtualization and also hosting my Jellyfin server.

One of my servers is an ARM64 server with 96 cores on the CPU, 256GB RAM, 20 TB storage.

Nils M Holm Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy DLNA server on a Raspi 1 running a self-compiled pre-release version of FreeBSD/ARM. Must be more than 10 years old now, but still running without problems.

morayner Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy erm. two, soon four. one for the website, one for the 3d printr, soon one for the proxy and one for pattern projections directly on the projector. I don't consider myself 'a techie' the slightest bit. honestly.

Marty Fouts Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy pretty much every modern general purpose computer runs servers without the user necessarily being aware of it, so unless you restrict “server” to the sense of dedicated server then nearly 100% of your replies should be yes.

Marty Fouts Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy but even then people might have servers that they don’t know are servers. Digital picture frames might be media servers for example.

@MartyFouts I probably wouldn't count that, even if it technically is a server of some description

@MartyFouts But one thing that the replies to my original toot have taught me is that defining what a server is is far from simple!

Marty Fouts Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy It’s context sensitive. In IT context it usually refers to a piece of hardware dedicated to running software services, like a name server; but in software development it usually refers to a piece of software provided a service, like a name server. 😉

Someone else already gave a good definition for software that I paraphrase: “listener for and responder to requests.” A hardware server is then any device that runs a software server and IT context is a dedicated server.

Pascal d'Hermilly Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy
Everybody has. Your wifi router is 99% a Linux or BSD server.

@Pascal_dher True, but that's not really the sort of thing I had in mind.

Pascal d'Hermilly Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy
No and clearly you're right. The the amount of people with home servers are not that many 😉

Mark Burton Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy
Two Raspberry pi's.
1 runs raspian Linux and is a file server for backups.
1 runs Kodi - used with an old, not "smart" TV.

Lance, Enjoying Copious Pollen Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy My server is technically just a desktop PC running standard Linux Mint. I sometimes use it as a secondary desktop, too, but mainly it's my file and print server. It's also earning its keep by running Folding at Home 24/7.

souzsa Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I used to have one on a VPS for minecraft but I'd like to play with servers again once I find a cheap computer and free time

SlightlyCyberpunk Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Mostly Linux, one BSD :) Firewall/router, mail, web, nextcloud, git, and various experiments

Oh there's also the NAS, which in also my gaming rig/media center PC...but that's still Linux too :)

MyYeeHaa Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Linux Docker host running NAS, pihole, Plex, some HA, MQTT, and maybe some other stuff ( I forget all I'd put on there... heh)

JamesB Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy "All of the above"

BitcoDavid #ResistTrump Sep 17, 2024

DNS, NTP, SMTP.

Moss da Bard 🇨🇦🇧🇧🇲🇽🇬🇱Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy
All machines in my house run Linux Mint 22 Mate. Two of them also run Bodhi Linux 7, One of those also also runs KDE neon and the other one of those also also runs Feren OS. 4 active machines, 2 of which multiboot.

Hyacin Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I refuse to say "running Linux" as that unfairly reduces what Proxmox does.

Also - "a" server ?!

Across my Proxmox cluster I have 70 cores and 190 GiB of memory. But in addition to that I have 4 NAS (arranged as 3 virtual), and insane amounts of networking hardware!

Supported by all that are several VMs (Home Assistant a big one), a few low level containers (Hashicorp Vault cluster for example), and several Kubernetes clusters. One of those contains and runs all my home automation that exists outside of Home Assistant (which is a lot), another one manages the first with the Argo suite so everything can be deployed with GitOps and is easy to repair/replace if needed. Another is a static cluster for playing _within_, but then I also have several clusters I can tear down and recreate at any time for playing with the actual clusters. And the last one I have isolated with VLANs and then exposed with a special VPN for a former co-worker to use as a lab 🙂

@hyacin I think you qualify as a techie 🙂

kat 🌻Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy 3: our gateway, MythTV, and the IoTaWatt.

@kataclyst Ah, I think you're the first to mention MythTV. That's the primary use of my server (though I use it for a bunch of other stuff too). I was beginning to think I was the only one!

Ambient Sponge Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Yes. I have my media server running. I used to run an FTP server too.

All in Windows because that's what I use, but it'll all be moving to Linux when I do soon.

tecleandor Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Yep, I have a couple of them. One it's my NAS and also does some file synchronization between devices and bit torrent downloading. Another has some small server applications for my home/friends/work. Mastodon/web sites/other stuff.

Min

Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy I voted "Yes, running Linux", but I actually have:
- A Synology NAS, used for backups / media storage / file sharing
- A Raspberry Pi, used for home automation
- A System76 Thelio Mira, which is actually a work machine that is used as a build server and for running GPU-intensive compute jobs

Evan Light Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy @jdp23 ProxMox hosting LXCs and VMs for home media, home automation, NAS, and more.

Workshopshed Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy it's not currently turned on but I do have a server capable of running MQTT, Grafana and InfluxDb.

https://github.com/Workshopshed/ming_pi

GitHub - Workshopshed/ming_pi: Docker-compose repo for a containerised #MING (Mosquitto, InfluxDB, NodeRed, Grafana) stack for Raspberry Pi 4

Docker-compose repo for a containerised #MING (Mosquitto, InfluxDB, NodeRed, Grafana) stack for Raspberry Pi 4 - Workshopshed/ming_pi

GitHub

Steve Bannister Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy @paco two NUCs, one running home assistant and one Roon.

Gnorzaps Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy pihole and a few other services for one of my vlans

mirabilos Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy BSD of course!

Fuerchtegott Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy Open Media Vault (old Debian Buster distro) running my homelab Server on HP Proliant V7 machine and a raspberry PI2b running my sun worker (open JDK and shell scripts)

Token Sane Person Sep 17, 2024

@statsguy It's a Raspberry Pi that does the house email. It used to do DHCP, DNS and VPN, but then I got a router that runs OpenWRT, which makes it easier to do those there. The router also runs the Asterisk VOIP phone system, which was mainly set up to block spam calls by demanding an extension number if you want to talk to a human. Voice mail gets wrapped up in an email and passed to the Pi. So really I've got two servers, I suppose.

@statsguy
I was gonna say no but then I remembered my raspberry pi Linux based home assistant, is that techy enough?

@lettosprey Definitely

Richard Crawshaw Sep 18, 2024

@statsguy I chose 'no', though I used to have a Windows Home Server, 15 years ago; still got the hardware, never got around to doing anything else with it. Before that a W2K server on an old 1Gig Athlon; still got that hardware too. I've found that software is more interesting than faffing with hardware...

Nartagnan ⏚Sep 18, 2024

One for the shared bookkeeping of our group (and other little services).
And soon, a second one in an other place for backups.

Mad Alex Sep 18, 2024

@statsguy No server here, just 3 NAS systems from QNAP. All my services run on my main system, except my Plex Media Server which runs on a fan-less system next to the TV and the third is my backup target 6 floors down connected via powerline.

Axel 🚴😷🐧🐪⌨ | #WeAreNatenom Sep 18, 2024

@statsguy: Forgot to comment: Two HPE MicroServer Gen 10 as backup and archive server running Debian GNU/Linux Stable, a Raspberry Pi 2 as monitoring, ADS-B and test server running Debian Unstable (not Raspberry Pi OS).

bashfulrobot / Dustin Krysak Sep 21, 2024