Guide
Six recipes that turn a spare machine into something the household actually uses: a password vault, network-wide filtering, file sync, uptime checks and a media library.
A home server does not start as a plan. It starts as a machine that is no longer the main laptop, and the question is what to put on it that will still be running in three months. This set answers that question with six services that share a property: each one is useful on its own, so nothing here depends on finishing the rest.
The order matters. The vault and the resolver change how every device in the house behaves, and both are small enough to leave the machine idle. File sync comes next, because it is the first service whose failure you would notice. Monitoring earns its place as soon as there is more than one thing to watch, and the media services are the reward — they are also the two you can drop without consequence if the hardware turns out to be tighter than expected.
Everything here is written for a local network. That is a deliberate limit: none of these recipes are ready to be published to the internet as they stand, and the installation levels on each page say exactly which requirements a public deployment would still need. Reach the services over a VPN and the set stays inside the boundary it was designed for.
Sets
The sum of the minimums the recipes below declare. It is a floor, not a recommendation: leave room for the operating system, backups and growth.
Why it is here: Start here. A vault is the service that pays for itself on the first day, it needs a quarter of a gigabyte, and the official Bitwarden clients talk to it unchanged — so the household keeps the apps it already knows.
Why it is here: The one service every device benefits from at once, without installing anything on any of them. Point the router at it and filtering applies to the television as much as to the laptop — but arrange a fallback resolver first, because a broken DNS server looks like a broken internet.
Why it is here: Sync without a cloud: the laptop and the phone exchange files directly, so there is no server to keep online and nothing to fill up. Treat it as replication rather than backup — a deletion travels as fast as an edit.
Why it is here: Once several services run at home, you need to know which of them stopped answering while you were out. Running the monitor on the same box is the honest compromise: it watches everything except the failure that takes the whole machine down.
Why it is here: The lightest way to get value out of a music collection that is currently a folder on a disk. It streams to any Subsonic-compatible client and asks for 256 MB of RAM.
Why it is here: The heaviest thing in this set, and still modest at 1 GB, as long as clients play files directly. Plan for a processor that can transcode only if you intend to watch outside the house.