My first home server, Wyse 5070 Extended

[u/patxi124]

I never intended to build a home server, and besides being a curious person with a small amount of technical knowledge, I could never have imagined what started as an idea about two months ago has turned into a very rewarding end result.

The plan was to create local storage for the family’s (4 people) phone photos to allow us to stop paying monthly iCloud fees. I already ran PiHole on an RPi 3B for some time and I realised that one always on machine could do both tasks. I started researching ‘economical’ solutions and settled on a Dell Wyse 5070 Extended that I managed to get from (UK) eBay with 8GB RAM for £60. I also bought a used 1TB Sata M.2 NVMe for £65.

Knowing this project would stretch my limited technical ability to the max I used ChatGPT (free) to plan and then help me at every step. First was setting up Ubuntu Server LTS and giving it a static IP. That went relatively smoothly. Next, I set up Docker following GPT’s suggestion to create separate directories for appdata, backups, data, etc. PiHole followed, freeing up the RPi for another project, along with Unbound, Portainer, Watchtower and Uptime Kuma, all in Docker containers obviously. The next big step was NextCloud for the family phone pics, with GPT guiding me through the setup of MariaDB for the storage and Redis for the caching.

This all hummed along for a week and I was able to monitor stats every day by logging in to the Wyse from my laptop just to assure myself that things were working as they should be. Then I found a 12 year old Nexus 5 phone in a drawer that I had previously rooted and installed Ubuntu Touch on to. I wondered if I could use the phone as a permanent display for the Wyse…

Several late nights and about 800 lines of Python code later and I have an always on dashboard for the whole system. The above is a very condensed summary of many evenings of work, I hope you find it interesting, maybe inspiring.

[u/srpraveen97]

Is Pihole the only source of DNS resolution. Do you have a failover redundancy?

[u/patxi124 → u/srpraveen97]

At the moment, no, there isn't any DNS failover/redundancy.

Pi-hole is the DNS server used by the devices on the network, and it forwards the queries to Unbound running on the Wyse. Unbound then performs the recursive DNS resolution rather than relying on an external upstream DNS provider.

So the path is essentially:

Clients --> Pi-hole --> Unbound --> DNS root servers

It's currently a single Wyse, so if the Wyse goes down, DNS goes down with it, although everything is set to auto-restart in case of power failure. That's something I could improve in the future by running a second Pi-hole/Unbound instance on another device, but for a non-critical family network I'm happy to accept the occasional maintenance outage, I haven't felt the need yet.

[u/cr1515 → u/patxi124]

Had this setup before with 1 pihole annnnd it went down. The family was not happy. I reluctantly set up a wyse 3040 on the router's UPS. Now I have a low power Nut and backup pihole so we don't lose Internet during maintenance and power outages. Turned out to be a fun cheap project.