I've had a "home lab server" for a while now, it's nothing special but I think I can do more with it, I just don't know what to do with it... I currently use it just for a pihole and (sometimes) a Minecraft server or a web server... I used to also have a nexcloud and a searxng instance (which I will probably bring back)... Any ideas for other things I can run on it?
That's a really open-ended question. Depends purely upon your interests and appetite for risk, etc.
Might be worth looking at, from a Docker perspective:
AdGuard Home (I think it's better than Pi-Hole)
Wireguard or similar. Great for reaching your services when away from home.
Audiobookshelf. Audiobooks. There are good apps.
Calibre-Web. Ebooks.
RSS feed reader, for non-social media websites you visit. Plenty to choose from: FreshRSS, TT-RSS, Sismics, etc.
Gitlab CE. If you're a developer or can otherwise make use of version control.
Gotify. Alerting on your containers. Has a good mobile app.
Heimdall. A dashboard for everything you're running.
Komga. If you're into manga. The best iOS app is meh, but the best Android app is awesome.
Mealie. Recipe database.
Paperless-ngx. Excellent for storing your PDFs and other digital life.
PhotoPrism. Basically Google Photos.
Portainer. Great for managing Docker containers/stacks.
qBitTorrent. Guess what that's for.
SWAG with Authelia. SWAG does reverse proxying with a Let's Encrypt certificate, and automatically renews it for you. Authelia provides MFA (Authy, Google Authenticator, etc) on top of it.
Vikunja. Todoist or Toodledoo without having to pay for features.
Wallabag. Basically Pocket.
Watchtower. Automatically updates containers for you. Can exclude the ones you don't want to update, etc.
Webtrees. Family tree research, if that's your thing.
YouTransfer. Useful for sharing files without having to use Dropbox, etc.
I have in the past run a Valheim server and a VRising server, too. FWIW.
I'll echo AGH being better. And there's a sync if you run two instances like I do. Wallabag is solid and its even better with Minflux as your RSS reader. Super tight integration to save from RSS to Wallabag. Love it.
I'm a huge fan of Immich (Google Photos clone). I disabled the ML features which kneecaps it a little, but it runs totally fine on an rpi 4 (4GB).
There are other self hosted image solutions, e.g. PhotoPrism, so check out the options first. I used PhotoPrism for a while, but I like the Immich mobile apps (Android and iOS!), so am sticking with it.
I'm also running pihole, Wireguard, and Home Assistant (and fail2ban). Simple nginx web server handles the proxy business for Immich, and I also use that for sharing stuff with friends and family (e.g., a link to a PDF or something). I finally got around to installing SSL certs, and it was almost disappointingly simple! certbot just worked for me.
I use KeepassXC for my password manager and I'm happy with it, though I'd be happy if I can figure out a way to setup password fole sync within my LAN without having to setup nexcloud. As for smart devices, got none, I'm not lazy enough to spend 100s of dollars on automatic lamps and stuff... Not yet anyways
I switched from keepass to vaultwarden (self hosted bitwarden) and am glad I tried it out as am finding it so much better on all my devices. I definitely recommend giving it a try if you're just looking to tinker with things
Not too long ago, Walmart had a set of 4 RGBW LED lightbulbs for, like, $10. They were the Philips offshoot WiZ, and they work pretty good for how cheap they were. There are several decent budget brands out there now that just use wifi, so there's no big investment.
Take back the control on your data, that's the whole point.. :) Where are you regularly saving data? Those are the prime candidates. Look at self-hosted alternatives for those services. I know big webapps hosted in docker containers managed by kubernetes is all the rage around here, but you can often find Unix style equivalent for such services, the main advantage of putting it on a server being to be able to access it from multiple devices. But you do you, if you prefer hosting big webapps, that's fine too. :)
Thing is, I already have control over my data, now I'm wondering what else I can do with it. I mostly save data locally, the only things I'm really missing are a sync for my password manager and for my Firefox stuff (I don't use ff sync), but I'm also planning to upgrade my "server" and am wondering what to upgrade it with, that's why I'm asking for ideas, because idk what to upgrade it with... It's got a fairly decent CPU (some AMD FX 8core), 16GB ram, but no GPU ( fully headless rn) and only 128GB storage... So yeah, that's why I'm asking for ideas...
What public services do you use that you think you'd want to self host? I'm trying to reduce the data i give to big companies so i starred running an instance of Audiobook-shelf and use it to auto grab my podcasts from an rss feed and keep a copy on my server plus it serves up all my audio books too. Or you could set up a vpn back to your network via wireguard and get the benefits of pihole when you're not home. If you feel like really digging into things you could host your own lemmy instance, or matrix chat and bridge in other serviced but that requires a bit more advanced knowledge.
I already have wireguard setup to pass my pihole through a VPN. As for my own Lemmy instance, I've thought about it, but I don't have the storage nor bandwidth for it...
If i remember correct the vm i'm running lemmy on has less than 300gigs of storage and i've used less than half of that with running lemmy for a couple of months with a hand full of users. I can't speak to the bandwidth aspect but i'd imagine self hosting lemmy would almost be better suited for low bandwidth so it can pull down the posts over time and hold them locally for you when you're ready, but thats just a guess.