Not something that would have to be on all the time, but more something that can be off overnight. This question feels like it has an obvious yes/no answer that I’m missing.
Edit: pihole was a bad example
I’ve got 2 pihole instances in my home, one on my Unraid server in a Debian VM as a backup in case the main one goes down.
The main one is running from a cheap Igel M340c thin client I bought off eBay for around £20 ($25) running Ubuntu Server.
Cheaper than a Raspberry Pi at the moment and perfect for running a Pihole on.
If you want something cheap, consider a used thin client machine.
No. It will become a pain. For 100$ you can get an SBC or, better yet, a second hand HP Mini computer with 6-8th gen i3/i5 CPU that is most likely enough for your needs.
From experience I would say avoid this. I started my homelab this way. First it was a plex server just so 1 family member could locally stream movies without me having to copy it to a flash drive. Then another family member saw it, so it was 2, then 3. Less than a year later I have ~10-15 regular regular streamers and I can’t play video games on my computer from the hours of 4PM to 1AM because my CPU was being hit so hard.
Eventually I built a new gaming rig, pulled out my GPU. Turned the old machine into a full time server and gamed on the new machine.
Exactly the same thing I did. Now I’m looking to upgrade my server PC cus it’s still running an i5-4690K and struggles if anyone needs transcoding.
Haha that sounds familiar. My plex server is on a 4770k and my unRAID server is on a 4790k. Finally getting parts to decommission the 4770k.
It would make sense if you’re using your main machine to test the waters with to see if it’s worth getting invested.
So your pihole as an example would work as follows:- Install Docker.
- Follow the docs to install the container/image/etc. for pihole
- Change your home router’s DNS entries to now START with your main machine.
--Your main machine goes offline for the night, your home router uses the secondary as does everything else that’s now been taught by DHCP to use your main machine for primary DNS. - Make your call and break it all back to where it started.
With the primary DNS being a “local”, I can’t imagine it taking that long to realize it’s offline and change to the secondary DNS on most devices. Make sure you set your “main machine” to a Static/DHCP Reserved IP on the home router, as a good general practice.
Other things I self-host are media related. I like to watch media from bed instead of in front of the computer. I turn my computer off when I’m not at it.
I could see if you were like hosting a local repository maybe. Like you want that whole “self-hosted” GitHub experience. That would be a decent use case for main machine hosting. Or VMs for testing different environments.Just fyi how a client handles multiple DNS servers might not always be you expect and just depends on how it was implemented. Some clients can just send a DNS request to all DNS servers at once and take whatever responds first, essentially randomizing which DNS server gets used
And a local will always respond faster than non-local, unless that local is turned off.
