If you’re already running Pihole, I’d look at other things to do with the Pi.

https://www.adafruit.com/ has a bunch of sensors you can plug into the Pi, python libraries to make them work, and pretty good documentation/examples to get started. If you know a little python, it’s pretty easy to set up a simple web server just to poll those sensors and report their current values. Only slightly more complicated to set up cron jobs to log data to a database and a web page to make graphs.

It’s pretty straightforward to put https://www.home-assistant.io/ in a docker on a Pi. If you have your own local sensors, it will keep track of them, but it can also track data from external sources, like weather & air quality. There a bunch of inexpensive smart plugs ($20-ish) that will let you turn stuff on/off on a schedule or in response to sensor data.

IMO, Pi isn’t great for transport-intensive services like radarr or jellyfin, but, with a Usb HD/SSD might be an option.

I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.

Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.

3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.

2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing

1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.

If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it’s really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I’d probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.

All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.

TY. Looks like the T6 is pro-only. Googling around, it looks like ventilation control may be one of the things that separate their pro-level T6/T10 from their DIY-level T5/T9. That’s disappointing.

Does the Honeywell T6 give you separate control of temperature and fan? That is, can you turn air circulation on/off, even when the temperature wouldn’t trigger heating/cooling?

I’ve been watching pm2.5 in my house, and the HVAC filter does a pretty good job of keeping it down if I run the fan, but that fan takes a lot of energy, and I’d like to turn it off when the air is pretty clean.

My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.

I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.

Having a single, central receiver to collect inputs from 5+ A/V sources and deal them back, arbitrarily? to 6 different outputs seems awfully complicated. Something like Jellyfin or mythtv with one or more TV tuners would let you originate all of the TV & streaming signals from your central source to client players - kodi or whatever - in the player rooms. Most of those have at least some control through homeassistant. Kodi on RPis with some basic class D amplifiers in each room, run through the TV, if the room has a TV. Probably couldn’t get synchronized audio in all rooms that way.

Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like

stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;

as POST data, and responses like

qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000

plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn’t care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.

This won’t help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.

So, I self-host quicken.com. It’s saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.

Yeah, don’t let the bashers get you down: wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here. Measuring your power use is the only way to make informed choices, and sometimes the results are surprising.

Like, I was surprised to find that my audio gear uses exactly the same power whether it’s playing or not. The subwoofer alone uses twice as much power as the RPi that feeds it signal. It’s maybe 0.02 USD/day (for the sub), but I’ve got extra smart plugs from a multi-pack, and it’s easy enough to put together an automation to power them all down if they’ve been idle a while.

Exactly. I’m just here to say that regulation isn’t a solution to corporate malfeasance - at best it is a patch until the corp lawyers figure out where the loopholes are or how to accomplish the malfeasance in a different way.

Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn’t fit.

Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.

Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there’s tons of libraries to facilitate.

RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array ‘degraded,’ as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

Ditto on hardware raid. Adding a hardware controller just inserts a potentially catastrophic point of failure. With software raid and raid-likes, you can probably recover/rebuild, and it’s not like the overhead is the big burden it was back in the 90s.