What Are Some Must Have Open Source Home Servers

Thanks for this. The exact same difficult situation exists in Canada.

I would argue that as soon as one even so much as wants to run iperf3 on one’s router (an indispensable network diagnostic tool, IMHO), now one’s wifi router is a server! (And we haven’t strayed OT).

(Note: I’ve had minor hardware revision version incompatibilities myself with a recent Asus router: it was an oddball minor version difference from what OpenWRT was wanting, so I reluctantly stayed with the stock Asus firmware. I felt it wasn’t worth the risk of bricking, as it’s still a reasonably valuable router. No other open source firmware would support this oddball hardware revision either.)

Thanks for the recommend. :slight_smile:

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Well, keep in mind that while it has been a great WiFi router, it is several years old. Please do you research.

I have been running Linksys routers for a long time. I always check to make sure that the specific model I am looking for is on the supported list for DD-WRT or OpenWRT. I also ran a Buffalo router for a bit. It, too, was a good router and ran on DD-WRT with no issues.

It looks like the WRT3200ACM was replaced with the MR8300. Taking a quick glance, it appears that the MR8300 is not supported by DD-WRT, but it is supported by OpenWRT.

If you’re worried about bricking the router, see if you can find a used router to test with. It’s always good to have an unmodified, or otherwise working, router standing by if needed.

This is a good thread.

I really like the OpenCanary idea. I might steal that one.
Once piece of software I would like to add/suggest is Zabbix. Once you have a few devices on your home network, like file and media servers, you are going to want some monitoring. I think Zabbix is a pretty good home solution because it is fairly easy to setup and it is relatively light weight.

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A whole pi will be gathering log data? Is that an intensive process?

I’ve done 100+ hours of excruciating research on past routers. My past favorites were the Linksys WRT54G[L], and the Asus RT-N16. I’ve used Tomato (defunct now), DDWRT, and OpenWRT firmwares quite a lot (but that was several years ago).

I especially loved using the WDS (Wireless Distribution System), that Tomato allowed between multiple installs of those 2 routers. WDS alone is worth one or more instructional videos, as it’s non-trivial, and can be firmware-, or even wireless-chipset-specific (if you’re unlucky).

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I guess I’m naively and patiently waiting for someone to make an awesome Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 breakout board, which has all the things you’d want a decent router to have, like 5 GbE ports, a WAN port, and 2+ bigger antennas. The CM4 pretty much screams out to be part of a router.

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Yes, me too. To catch an attempted hack in real time is indeed intriguing!

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You and I have a lot of the same experience. I was once running VoIP out of my house and used Tomato specifically, at that time, it’s QoS capabilities.

In the past, I have owned several WRT54’s of various versions. It was an excellent router back in the day.

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After some hacking around, I wrote up a brief installation tutorial of Canary on an RPi4, in Ubuntu 20.04.

PS: It works! My honeypot has several fake services running, and the email notification works as I expect, when I try to connect.

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Cool.

I got it running in a VM under Debian 10 yesterday. I had some trouble trying to get it to run under a virtualenv, so I set it up as follows:

sudo -i
sudo apt install python3-setuptools python3-pip python3-dev samba
sudo pip3 install wheel
sudo pip3 install opencanary

I then edited the samba config and created the opencanary configuration file.

To get it to run under python3 I did the following:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python2.7 2
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3.5 3

No doubt that has broken something (probably apt), so I’ll no doubt blow it away and set it up again. If it works out, I’ll get the installation automated with ansible.

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Thanks! I feel like I don’t need anything of why you moved away from or what you miss ha! I’m still going to investigate, as I need to revamp my server!

How did you rip you TVs/movies for Jellyfin? I’ve tried with various success of getting this done, and I know it will take time, but I want something that I know just WORKS so I can do it over and over again.

Just a syslogd server where I configure syslogd on other devices to push syslog messages to the Pi. This is more of an learning project for me from an IT Ops and SecOps stand. I’ve never used Grafana and want to see how well it can analyze logs.

I’m really wanting to see how well Loki can analyze the logs. Like Prometheus, it does not index the logs like ELK or Splunk, so it does not require large amounts of disk space.

The hypothesis of this science project is 'could Granafa/Loki be used as a poor man’s SIEM?"

That, plus I want to learn to build dashboards with Grafana. This is a good skill to have at work.

Bring Email under your control and install MailU

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I am not familiar with Mailu, looks like a very cool project.

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Two ways. If you want to Rip ISOs (Jellyfin/Kodi can deal with ISOs, Plex never will ) use dvdbackup

If you want to compress it down to smaller files you can take the backup you made above and use it as a source for Handbrake to transcode to your optimal format. Then you can delete the original image.

You can also use makemkv the choice is yours.

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I would say this is pretty much the first stop for anyone running a Linux server of their own for the first time. When installed from a snap, it’s a high-gain, low-pain first foray into running your own linux server. Lots of bang for the buck, in the sense of invested time and effort, and what you get back out of it.

I say Nextcloud is the flagship service of the Linux, and even Raspberry Pi world.

Having said this, I’m sure Pi-hole and Kodi are solid as well (from what I hear), but I don’t have any personal experience yet with those.

thanks for dvdbackup! I don’t have a ton of shows/movies, but I don’t know that I need the iso either. I’ve also looked at using Handbrake and makemkv, but there are a mountain of options. Are there some standard ones that are ‘good enough’? I only have DVDs, no BluRays, so I don’t need 4K HDR when rewatching Mork and Mindy.

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I’ve used makemkv in the past, it can navigate some DRM that handbrake cannot. It will give you an identical quality file though which are pretty large so that’s when I pass them off to handbrake to save space. Or just keep them as original quality mkv files for archival purposes and throw the cases away. Hard drives are practically cheaper than shelves anyways.

This should be a new thread I think.